


Love is the Art of Disappearing

by AlwaysLera



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-22
Updated: 2013-08-21
Packaged: 2017-12-24 06:35:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 12,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/936562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlwaysLera/pseuds/AlwaysLera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One year ago, Clint was nearly fatally wounded on a mission. Natasha made a split second life and death decision that saved his life, and revealed her greatest secret. One she had kept from even him. The aftermath tore them apart, but a crucial mission put them back on the same team. They must learn to trust each other again, now in the light of each other's betrayals, especially on a mission that seems to have everything go wrong...</p><p>Alternate Universe: magic!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> What is love? Love is the absence of judgment. –Dalai Lama

_Six Months Before New York City_

            Clint Barton was not a patient man. Oh, in some ways, he had infinite patience. Stakeouts and sitting in uncomfortable positions waiting for the perfect shot was how he made a living, after all. He could have all the patience in the world when he wanted to have it, and therein lay the key. He didn’t want to have patience. Not this morning. He hated meetings. He really hated meetings that pulled him out of the fields. The cherry on this less than cheerful morning was he was required to wear a _suit_. A fucking suit. Like he was one of _them_.

            “Stop looking like I’m waterboarding you. It’s a button-down shirt tucked into somewhat clean looking khakis. That’s all I asked for.” Coulson handed him a manila folder when they met in the hallway. He seemed nonplussed by the scowl Clint shot at him as he opened the folder and flipped through. “How was Austria?”

            “Would have been better if I could have kept an eye on our mark instead of getting called out.” Clint muttered, half distracted as they wove through the hallways of one of SHIELD’s top secret bases. In the back of his head, he thought, _It’d be easier if I traveled the way I did that once._ But he didn’t anymore. That part of his life, of his missions, was over. In a world of magic and nightmares, he never thought he’d miss something so unnatural. The emptiness that absence left in him was slowly, over the months, overwhelming the anger that consumed him at first. “How’s your cellist?”

            “She has a name, Barton.”

            Clint glanced up at his friend, recruiter, and largely, the only person he could ever get along with for any amount of time. “I know. How’s Nicole?”

            Coulson shot him a smile that was partly between forgiving and grateful. “She’s good. We’ve been busy here so I haven’t seen her in a few weeks.”

            They stopped at a set of doors and Coulson said, “A few other people are in here already. We pulled a few people out of the field for this one.”

            “Anyone I know?” asked Clint, still distracted by the aerial surveillance photos in his briefing packet.

            “Keep an open mind and don’t be an idiot,” Coulson replied, opening the door.

            Clint stepped into the room, casting Coulson a curious look over his shoulder. There were two or three people in the room already, flipping through their own briefing packets. Eyes flicked up to Clint, and he heard someone murmur his last name in greeting. He didn’t recognize the voice and it wouldn’t have mattered. One person looked up when I came in and she didn’t drop eye contact with me. She didn’t look much different than the last time I saw her. Maybe a little thinner in her face, but her red hair was as wild as it ever was. She could tame it, if she wanted, but she never wanted. Her blue eyes chilled when they met his eyes, her lips thinning into a bright red line. Her hands curled into fists around her pen and on her briefing packet.

            “You have to be _fucking kidding me.”_ Clint’s voice started out completely normal, and then rose, pitching forward with his anger and he threw his briefing packet and spun out off the room to leave. Coulson shut the door and blocked the handle. Clint met Phil’s calm eyes with his furious ones. He growled deep, “Get the fuck out of the way. You’re fucking kidding me. I’m done.”

            “You’re not done. You’re a professional. You’re an agent of SHIELD and you have worked here longer than anyone in this room.”

            “I’m not working with her.”

            Phil’s eyes moved over Clint’s shoulder to look at the woman on the other side of the table. “Agent Romanov knew that you would be here. She is here to work on this operation. I ask that you match her professionalism.”

            It was a low blow. A low, dirty blow. Clint scowled at Phil. Lowering his voice, he said, “You know what you’re asking.”

            Phil met his eyes calmly. “I know.”

            Clint scrubbed a hand over his face. “Fuck, Phil.”

            “Sit down, Clint.” Phil spoke quietly and calmly, the voice Clint had heard before, had heard used against Natasha Romanov when Clint first came home with her, battered and bleeding, the voice Clint had used before, with too many people, with too many people now gone, with Natasha, and maybe, once with Phil. The, _I know. I hear you. Trust me._ , implicit in the tone, lacking in the words.

            Clint sat down, across from Natasha. No one spoke, and he could feel the weight of everyone’s eyes moving between him and the woman across from him. That’s how it had always been. That, at least, felt normal. Not meeting her eyes, not teasing her, not looking at her…that was abnormal. But then, so was she.

            A lead SHIELD agent, on par with Coulson, came into the room and turned on the projector. “My name is Hector Vasquez and I’m briefing you about the leader of LARC and our target for this mission. We have a very short window. In the next eleven days, we’re tracking and verifying Omar Martin’s identity and taking him out. As you know, LARC is the Latin American Resource Council whose primary goal is to overthrow democratically elected governments and turn Latin America into some kind of anarchy. They kidnap people for money or to use as drug mules and are generally all around bad news.”

            “If you don’t know LARC, you shouldn’t be sitting in here.” Clint met Vasquez’s eyes. No one looked at him.

            Vasquez must have been prepped for Clint’s typical briefing behavior. He did not even give Clint an eye roll. “I’m briefing thoroughly, Agent Barton. Here’s the deal. We believe that Martin is going to be this location,” he brought up a map and zoomed in on the screen, “the day after next for a meeting with some of his top lieutenants. Judging by the amount of food they’ve had shipped in, they’ll be there for a few days. Martin will be touring some of their local installations. This is territory they hold well. Our intelligence is good that Martin should be here every evening, however. In 48 hours, we’re sending Alpha Team—that’ll be Barton and Raines—to make visual contact and verify identity. Then on Saturday night, we’re sending in the team to take out Martin, blow up some key installations, and acquire a laptop from an office. In your briefing packets, you have identification material on all of the top people. We’re running three exercises, one today, and two before the team goes out on Saturday.”

            “Exercises,” repeats someone else.

            “Everyone in this room is about to be read into a top secret project by Agent Coulson.” Vasquez gestured to Phil.

            Coulson took the podium. “You are reminded that everything in this room is for your ears only. You will receive no documentation.”

            Clint’s stomach turned cold. Without meaning to, he glanced sideways at Natasha. She was incredibly still, staring at her hands. Only her right forefinger trembled. He knew this, instinctively, to be a nervous twitch. The only one she had. She was reaching for her ring, the one she didn’t wear anymore, the one that used to be on her left ring finger. He watched her lips part to make room for a shuddering breath. His heart wanted him to reach out, kick her gently under the table so she’d know she wasn’t alone. His mind held his tongue and his foot back, kept them where he was. Safe. Silent. Far away from her.

            “Agent Romanov has a unique ability to do what we call folding time and space. She is able to instantaneously travel between locations and targets.” Coulson stated this calmly, like he expected everyone to keep up with the information. Clint knew he was the only one who did. He was the only other one—other than Coulson and Fury—who knew what she was—what she could do—before this moment. Coulson continued, “There are, as with everything, some limitations. She must know the exact specifications of the room she’s entering and exciting. To move others, she needs to be touching them. And if she is injured or has low energy, the distance and length of her jumps are limited.”

            “What?” asked Raines faintly.

            “I don’t understand,” said the only other woman on the team, Amy Kaplan.

            “You’ve read Harry Potter?” asked Clint. He knew his tone was harsh but he couldn’t be any kinder right now. He was barely holding it together. “She apparates. She’s like a fucking wizard.”

            “Fuck you,” snarled Natasha, looking up for the first time in minutes.

            “Enough,” barked Coulson. “Agent Barton, enough.”

            “It isn’t Harry Potter.” Natasha’s growl, throaty and wild, filled the room. He couldn’t meet her eyes. Couldn’t look at her. “It’s jumping. I do not have another word for it.”

            “Barton and Raines will get dropped into the jungle. They will not be jumped in by Romanov. They will identify Martin. When they return they’ll provide the identification and the specifications of the compound to Romanov and the rest of the team. We’ll practice jumping. It’s an unusual experience. You’ll need to be able to do it comfortably.”

            “Why are we doing this?”

            “Zero chance we could get planes into this air space and get ex fil without putting you guys in LARC territory during monsoon season. This is the best option.” Clint had to give Coulson credit. When he said it like that, it seemed _rational._ Reasonable, even.

            He wasn’t married to the woman who did it though.

            “Any questions?” asked Vasquez. There were none. “Your team room is A121. I’ll see you there at 1600 hours. Dismissed.”

            Clint was out of the room by the time everyone else exhaled in relief. For a moment, he hoped she’d come after him, that they could just get this over, but she didn’t come after him. It wasn’t her style. She wouldn’t do that.

            _“It’s not right, Phil,” said Clint, scratching at the beard he accidentally grew chasing the Russian assassin across Europe. “She moves too fast. I don’t see her leave and then she’s in another city an hour later. She’s got dopplegangers. Maybe clones. Do you think they clone in the Red Room? I can see them getting into that. Probably lucrative, especially if they all look like her.”_

_“What I think is you’re talking too much, Barton, which means you need to sleep. Go catch some z’s.”_

_Barton looked sideways at his handler. “What the fuck did you just say?”_

_“I’m trying hip new phrases. I’m taking a class.” Coulson’s eyes never left the glass pane from where they stood watching a medical team treat a heavily sedated Russian assassin for her various wounds. Clint half wished he had been the reason she showed up so battered and bruised, but he wasn’t. He was the reason she was still alive, however. He had chased her for seven months across the continent, called her elusive, but Fury told him to stick with it, that she was a crucial target. Then one night, she had shown up at the café where he was buying coffee, bleeding, broken, barely coherent, and said she’d turn if he could keep her safe._

_It’d take Clint a few more years to realize how far he’d take that promise._


	2. Chapter 2

It was shocking to see him again. Coulson prepared her. He sat her down a few days earlier and explained that they needed a foolproof trustworthy shot for this op. She knew what that meant. She had dismissed it, aloud, because she knew Barton to be Austria, but Coulson had only given her a quiet, sad smile. Her heart ached then, but she had hidden it. Wasn’t that what she did best? Hide her heart away? She steeled herself for him to walk into that room, unprepared for her presence. His face, it moved, so fast from shock, to sadness, to betrayal, to anger. She hadn’t expected him to try and leave but he was always doing the last thing she expected. She never expected him to walk away from her once, much less twice. That hurt, much more than Natasha was willing to admit to herself in the moment.

            He bolted from the meeting room as soon as the meeting ended, and she let him. She was angry enough to hurt him, and he was angry enough to rise to the challenge. The calm, controlled Clint Barton she knew was gone. Part of her wondered if that was her fault: if what she did—any of what she did—was the reason he was impatient, hot-headed, and prone to making mission mistakes. She saw his reports sometimes, if Coulson left them on his desk. After all, she could be wherever she wanted to be as long as she knew where it was ( _“It’s like a philosophical physics question,” Coulson said when she explained her gift, and he actually sounded delighted.”_ ).

            In their group room, though, she found Barton went straight to work. When she walked in, he was standing on a table, hands on his hips, staring at a drone surveillance tape with such an intense look, she remembered why he was called Hawkeye. She ran her eyes over him as she walked around his table to a corner table. He was thin, much thinner than he used to be. His fingers were curled into his palm, knuckles against his chin, and his eyes slid sideways. She looked away immediately as their eyes met and sat down at her desk. For Natasha, this was not a typical mission. She was the method of transportation. They had too many men who needed to get in and out of many places as quickly as possible. She just needed to know every single detail she could. If she was off, she could land them into a wall, at the least. At the worst, she could kill them all.

            The others came in, moved cautiously around her, and sat down. They chatted, excluding her, and traded mission stories. They did things like this: drug dealers, human trafficking. They did small missions. They did not do what she and Clint did. They didn’t do things so far above the idea of states and international boundaries and god, remember that time when they gave a shit about international law? It felt strange to be on this mission. Part of her suspected this was Coulson’s coming out mission for her skills. It had been a year since she was forced to reveal them to SHIELD, a year since everything fell apart.

            “Agent Romanov?” asked Amy tentatively.

            Natasha blinked. “Yes?”

            “Could you show us what Agent Coulson was talking about? I don’t think we really understand.”

            Natasha watched Clint’s jaw tighten. She knew his attention was no longer on the surveillance tape. She returned her attention to Amy. “Where would you like me to go?”

            “Volgograd,” snapped Clint.

            Natasha flinched. One of the other guys said, “Lay off her, man.”

            “You don’t need to defend me,” Natasha said coldly, “Not against him.”

            Clint snorted. Amy’s eyes were wide. “I didn’t mean to—“

            “I’ll go to the next room and back.” Natasha calmed herself down. She offered her hand to Amy. “Would you like to come?”

            Amy blushed and looked around warily, like she was looking for permission or encouragement from the others. Everyone stared at the two of them. She shrugged and took Natasha’s hand with her own clammy one. “Okay.”

            Jumping was a little like a high altitude parachute jump. There was the deep breath, the leap, a moment of suspension, and then a pounding rush slamming against her body, and then a drifting sensation. Somatic senses trickled in—in reality, it was milliseconds, but it felt like minutes—her hearing first, then touch—she could feel Amy’s hand clenching hers, clammy sweat the only separation between their skin—then smell, then sight, and lastly taste. She opened her eyes in the room next door where Phil Coulson stood, glaring at her. She smiled at him.

            “Not exactly code, Agent,” he said, sipping his coffee. “There could have been others in here.”

            “There weren’t. I guessed that. You never like your coffee with other people.” She didn’t add, _except for me and Clint. You always took your coffee with me and Clint._ She didn’t need to add it. She saw the recognition and sorrow in Phil’s eyes. When everything went down last year, Phil had taken it well. Phil was reasonable and rational. He understood she had made a split second decision about life and death. Other people were less rational. Other people were afraid and other people resented being called out on that fear.

            _“If you can get him about a half meter to the west, Tash, I got him in my sights. I’ve got too much wind interference otherwise.” Clint’s voice in her ear, terse and tense. He was edgy tonight. She wasn’t sure why. Normally he was the one who was calmly reassuring her in a mission. He didn’t know how much she gave up to work for SHIELD, to stay undercover, to stay below the radar. She had to change the whole way she operated, after all._

_She slid closer to the banister, slipping her winning sultry smile to lure him in. This mark was easy. He followed her like a puppy dog. There was the sharp sound of glass shattering and an arrow buried deep through the man’s chest swiftly ended his life. Natasha heard Clint in her ear telling her to get out but she didn’t need him to tell her twice. She went out the open window, rappelling down the side. She heard the door bang open just before she dropped, shouts of the man’s bodyguards, and then they fired at her over the side of the ledge._

_She yelped as one bullet sliced through the skin of her left arm._

_“What’s your status?” Clint, sounding a little calmer now that they were being shot at. The day she understood the man would be the day she died, probably._

_Her feet hit the ground. She cut the line so they couldn’t follow her and slipped down their previously planned escape route. She touched her shoulder and her fingertips came away red in the streetlights. Her arm burned ferociously. She grimaced and touched her ear. “Nothing serious. Grazed.”_

_“See you at rendezvous. Try not to bleed out.”_

_She would have laughed if she could have at the moment. She was wearing a ridiculous dress and it was hard enough to run in it, much less run with her left arm dangling and throbbing. She made a fist with that hand, just to reassure herself that she still could. She made the appropriate turns, and found the abandoned night club where she and Barton has stashed their getaway vehicle. He thought she was crazy but she liked riding a scooter out of the city. They’d blend in well here and they could get through traffic easily. They had a hotel on the outside of the city where they’d spend the night before taking the next SHIELD flight out of the country. It wasn’t good to stick around after these things._

_She leaned against the doorway and closed her eyes briefly. He wasn’t there yet. She glanced around before touching her ear again. “ETA?”_

_Silence._

_She frowned and took out the ear piece and inspected it. It looked fine. She slipped it back in. She wore a mic and an ear piece, he just wore the ear piece. They had had equipment failures before though. It wouldn’t be unheard of, until they got back to headquarters and Clint went to have words with R &D guys who punted it to the IT guys who punted it to Maintenance who punted it to Ops who punted it back to R&D until Clint got too tired of chasing down the problem and went to punch bags instead. More satisfying, he said. _

_She touched her ear again. “Widow to Hawkeye.”_

_Silence._

_She switched channels on the earpiece. “Widow to Coulson.”_

_“Coulson,” came Phil’s calm voice a minute later.“You’re breaking radio silence.”_

_Natasha looked at her cellphone’s clock. “I haven’t heard from Clint in five minutes. Not answering his comms.”_

_Silence from Phil for a moment. Natasha felt her heart hammering in her chest. Phil said quietly in her ear, “Let me check his GPS.”_

_Natasha shifted on her feet and looked up and down the street. It was quiet. In the distance, she heard sirens wailing._

_Phil said, “His GPS hasn’t moved in a few minutes. He may be down. He’s two blocks to your right.”_

_Natasha ran. She turned down the street, looked on porches, looked on front steps, and then with Phil guiding her, went into a small alleyway. There were a hundred things she had seen in her life before and never wanted to see again. Number one hundred and one was Clint laying on the ground, not moving._


	3. Chapter 3

For the most part, they avoided each other while preparing for the op. Clint didn’t like the circumstances much at all, but she seemed to know and respect that. At least, she didn’t deliberately provoke him. She sat on the other side of the room. She didn’t meet his eyes. She didn’t rise to his bait. He got yelled at by Coulson a hundred thousand times in the first two days. He didn’t care. Clint Barton knew what a grudge was and boy could he hold one. There were rules, and there were unbreakable rules. She had broken an unbreakable rule. It was pretty damn clear that forgiveness was off the fucking table and in case she forgot it, he’d remind her. Often.

            The others just ignored him after a time. It took him a few days to realize it was really weird that Natasha wasn’t rising to his bait, that she was meekly in the corner, that she didn’t even glare at him or roll her eyes. He thought maybe she was doing it behind his back but it didn’t take him long to rule that out too. Clint’s heart momentarily twinged at the thought that he had been such a monumental asshole that he broke the fucking Black Widow. Then he reminded himself that she’s the queen of deception. That in the art of tricking people into feeling things they don’t need to feel and don’t want to feel, she wrote the motherfucking book.

            So it surprised him that the morning he and Raines were supposed to drop in for recon that she sat across from him. She didn’t look, and didn’t say anything, but he was nostalgic and sad for a moment. The morning of missions, they used to eat breakfast together, in bed. He’d cook for them both and she’d sleep in because fuck if they didn’t both know how little she’d sleep out in the field. He’d wake her up and they’d eat pancakes and eggs and bacon in bed. And then he’d get to kiss the syrup off her mouth and their morning would go from there.

            Sitting across from him was a cruel and unnecessary trick. He scowled at her for a moment until he noticed she hadn’t touched her breakfast. She stared at it, intent, and a little pale. He kicked her under the table and her shoulders flinched. He rolled his eyes. “Hey. You’re not going into the field. Eat.”

            “Leave her be,” said Amy fiercely. She had become a bit of a Natasha fangirl lately.

            “Natasha,” Clint repeated. “Eat.”

            “I wish I was going with you.” Her words hang between them, heavy and soft, like her hair, like her body against his, like the Russian that slips from her lips when she’s unguarded. Clint saw everyone’s heads rear up and turn toward them, despite how softly she spoke. She looked up, her blue eyes wild, red rimmed, and she looked so fucking like—

            No. He was not going to go there. He forced himself not to drop eye contact. “Raines and I got it.”

            Her smile was sad, and incredibly small. He wanted to reach over the table and run his thumb over her lips to the corner of her mouth to push up her cheek in a fake smile, like he used to do to make her smile. She shrugged a little. “I know.”

            Clint looked at his limp mass produced SHIELD eggs. “Yeah.”

            He didn’t know what he meant by that, and he didn’t think she did either, but it was their first civil conversation in a year. That seemed to matter. He looked at her a few times over that breakfast. She barely poked at her food, but she conversed with the others, and seemed a little lighter to him when they all stood to leave the cafeteria. The whole team went to the aircraft hanger where Raines and he prepared to parachute into enemy territory. They had good odds of being seen in the air. The key was to disappear once they put their boots on the ground.

            When the first equipment check time came before they got on the plane, Natasha bit her lip and stepped away from him. Her look was almost apologetic. He wouldn’t have let her anyway—what if she left something wrong just to get him hurt?—and maybe she knew that. But he watched her watch Raines with sharp eyes that didn’t miss a single thing.

            He had been on a dozen missions in the last year without her. It was really weird to stand next to her and not kiss her, touch her, reach for her. That was weird. Clint shook his head. He needed to focus on the mission ahead of him. As they loaded onto the plane, he turned to Coulson. “If anything happens…”

            “Nothing’s going to happen, Barton,” said Phil calmly.

            Clint studied his calm hazel eyes and then nodded. He got into the plane and shut the door behind him. He sat across from Raines and reached for the necklace dangling around his neck. It was the one thing he kept from before. He wrapped his hand around Saint Sofia, the patron saint of Wisdom, and held onto it for the entire flight.

            _“You were dying. You were basically dead,” Coulson argued, watching Clint pace around the room._

_Clint pointed at him. “You fucking know I have problems with things against my consent. Especially fucking unnatural things, Phil. That’s just not fucking right. And she fucking lied to me. Is she even fucking human?”_

_“Try talking about her without profanity.”_

_“Fuck you.”_

_Coulson rolled his eyes. “Barton, pull your shit together. She saved your life.”_

_“I’d rather die than have someone use—god, what do you even call it?”_

_“A prenatural ability.”_

_“Magic.”_

_Coulson shrugged. “Why do you care what it’s called?”_

_“Because it’s not_ right. _”_

_“Right,” Phil said softly, “And everything else we do here is right.”_

_“There are rules, Phil,” Clint said after a pause. “There are rules to the world and she just violated all of them.”_

_“You need to get out more. And stop calling her by a pronoun. She has a name and she’s your partner. She’s_ your wife _. Enough of this. You can handle things personally however you want, but if you lay a hand on her, I will make you rue the day you were born.”_

_“I already do,” Clint said and then stopped in his tracks. He turned slowly. “Phil. I’m pissed, but I’m not going to hit her.”_

_“Say her name.”_

_Clint’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not going to hit Natasha. Besides, she’d win.”_

_“Right now, not so much.”_

_Clint looked out the window. “What does that make me? What did she do to me, Phil?”_

_“All of our tests said that she only saved your life. None of your parameters have changed.”_

_“I didn’t get that from her.”_

_“No, her unique abilities do not appear to be contagious.” The stiffness in Coulson’s voice should have alarmed Clint but he didn’t really care that much._

_“Who gave her the right to do that?”_

_“To use her ability to give you a blood transfusion from her own body and then to use her abilities to whisk you back here faster than we could have gotten you out of there to save your life? If you don’t know the answer to that, Clinton Francis Barton, I can’t help you.”_

_Clint didn’t answer. Coulson left. Everyone always did._


	4. Chapter 4

A twenty four hour mission was a long mission. No sleep, questionable food and water, dropping into enemy territory and then having to get to a rendezvous point. It was an impossible task for a larger group to do in a short time frame, which was why they were using her, but a nearly impossible task for even a group of two. If, before, she and Clint had received this mission, they’d have questioned every aspect of it and gone back to Ops and Logistics, complaining, a hundred times. They may not have taken it, even if they’d be punished with a bunch of lesser mission for a time period. They had done it before. Sometimes it was worth back to back missions in Siberia to stand up to the powers that be and say you didn’t intend on dying on a mission.

            Then, the mission in Brussels had been particularly easy and Clint had still almost died. Stabbed nearly to death in an alley, by someone they still didn’t know.

            Missions went wrong. Which was exactly why Natasha acquired coffee and a pile of granola bars and sat herself in the Ops room. Coulson walked in, did a double take, and barely contained a smile. He stood next to where she sat herself cross-legged on the floor and said, watching the screen, “He’ll be fine.”

            “I’m here for the group,” she corrected him.

            “He has no idea how lucky he is, you know. That you love him after all this time,” said Coulson, still not looking at her.

            Natasha’s throat felt thick. She swallowed. “I’m here for the group. Important that we see where we’re going too.”

            “Alright,” he said softly, and let her off the hook. Gratitude felt like a cold shower on a hot day. She slumped against the wall. He moved forward and took a comm. unit from the wall, turned the channel  to Clint and Raines, and the mission began a few minutes before they entered enemy airspace.

Natasha drank her coffee quickly and sat next to Coulson at his desk. Over his shoulder, she watched as Clint and Raines successfully landed in the jungle, largely undetected, and made their way three clicks north to the compound. Clint swore when they encountered a tree full of vipers, not exactly suitable for him to sit in with a scope, and Raines nearly tripped a booby trap, but they found their way largely without problems. Natasha’s eyes moved from the computer screen showing their vital signs, to the computer showing the camera off Clint’s scope, to the one transcribing their mikes which only Coulson could hear. The transcription wasn’t perfect. It struggled with Clint’s excessive cursing and his Midwestern accent that came out when he was stressed.

            Raines got the closest, getting onto the wall to take photographs and to use his binoculars and camera to snap photos of entry ways, people, guard houses, and the weapons carried and used. Natasha bit her lip and thought about how much easier it would be if she had gone. Some parts of the world were in fact easier if you were a woman. She twisted her hair around her finger, watching carefully. She needed to know the layout. They were doing this for her, so she could jump everyone wherever they needed to be, in order to accomplish a hundred things they couldn’t have done before SHIELD knew about her gift. They had been suspicious, then thrilled. Natasha had done the reverse: at first, relieved they knew her last secret. Then, suspicious as they began to use it.

            Coulson took off the comm. headset. “Want to run to the cafeteria and grab me some food?”

            “Sure,” Natasha agreed. “It’s Taco Tuesday.”

            “Everything but that shredded cabbage. It makes me sick.” He smiled at her.

            “It’s cabbage. It can’t make you sick. That’s the point of cabbage,” she replied flatly.

            “It does. Thanks, Natasha.”

            She glanced at the screen over his shoulder. “Call me if anything happens.”

            “It’s a ten minute break. Nothing will happen. Go get a taco for yourself and a taco for me.”

            He was right. Nothing happened while she went (ran) to the cafeteria and acquired dinner for the two of them. It happened just as she, Amy, and Slider all walked back into the room, chatting through mouthfuls of the worst tacos they ever had. Coulson reached for his taco, and then stopped, his hand outstretched and his eyes far away as he listened intently. Natasha froze, watching him, and then Coulson said with a snap, “Why did he do that? Where is he?”

            Her heart stopped. Coulson looked at his screen and said, “Barton, what’s going on?”

            “Coulson,” Natasha said as calmly as she could muster. The six other ops happening out of this room were going better because heads turned toward Coulson as he sent the imagery to the big screens and took off his headset. The mikes turned loud.

            “—took out his ear piece. They took him into the compound. Shit, I can’t see him. They went in this entrance. Fuck, Phil, I’m going in.” Clint, sounding tired but hyped up on adrenaline.

            “Stand down, Barton, we don’t know what’s going on.”

            “They’re going to kill him, that’s what’s going to happen.”

            “He’s a canary, Barton. Don’t be a dumb miner.” It was one of Coulson’s favorite analogies. Miners got hurt when they rushed to save each other in an accident without assessing the situation. Natasha didn’t really understand all of it, but it didn’t matter. She put down the tacos. Coulson glanced at her once and then said, “I have to clear this up top.”

            He said it to Clint but Natasha nodded too. She watched on the screen while Clint’s scope remained trained on an arched doorway through which Raines disappeared. She could see the blurred outlines of people running around, frantically. It was a testament to Clint’s skill that he hadn’t been sighted at this point.

            She touched the mike while Phil was on the phone. “Hi, Clint.”

            She heard his exhale, and Phil hissing her name behind her. “Not now, Natasha.”

            “Did you see them turn left or right?”

            “Right.”

            She studied the images. She knew the layout of the compound from the maps she studied when she couldn’t sleep. “It’s two hundred meters to the right to Palo’s office.”

            “You think they took him in there?”

            She began to braid her hair. “I could check.”

            “Oh fuck no,” said Phil and Clint together.

            She shook her head. “I can jump in and out before they even see me. Unless he’s there, and then I can grab him.”

            “This is a bad idea, Coulson. Is this your idea? Do you know what happens to her if they catch her? This is a terrible idea. This is too imprecise.”

            “Shut up, Barton,” said Phil. “It’s not happening.”

            Natasha scowled. “I can get him out of there.”

            “So can Barton.”

            “You realize if this goes South, you’re going to be sending me into get two men out, right? In potentially different areas of the compound. That’s more compromising to the longer mission than sending me now.”

            “You’re not going. How many jumps can you do like this in a week?”

            Natasha looked at the screen, but it was Clint who answered. “Seven, if she pushes herself.”

            She frowned. “You’ve never seen me do that. How’d you know?”

            “I read your file.”

            There was silence in the op room and then Clint said, “Martin’s back. I’ve got a positive ID on Martin.”

            Coulson rubbed his face. Fifty percent of the mission was achieved. But now he had had a man inside the compound probably being interrogated and tortured. He looked sideways at Natasha. “Barton, can you stand by where you are? Abort rendezvous. Natasha’s going to jump in, grab Raines if she can, and then jump to you, and then jump home.”

            “You’re nuts,” said Barton flatly. “We’ll get to the rendezvous. Don’t waste two jumps on me.”

            “They aren’t wasted.” Natasha said quietly. “I have four jumps to do this weekend. I’ll be okay. I’ll have recovery time.”

            “That gives you basically no wiggle room for things to go wrong.”

            “That’s not your call, Barton,” said Coulson sharply. “Stand by.” He turned down the mike over Barton’s protests. He looked at Natasha. “I agree that of those rooms, Raines is probably in the office. You get one try. If he’s not there, just get you and Barton out of there. You hear me?”

            Natasha nodded. “Can you pull up the room schematics for me one more time?”

            She studied them as she tied her shoes tightly and shed her jacket. It wasn’t going to be anything but cumbersome there. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and jumped.


	5. Chapter 5

He was not a patient man, but sitting there in a jungle waiting to find out if Natasha successfully jumped—or died trying to land between walls—and whether she found his partner was particularly horrible. Worse than walking into a room and seeing his ex wife, that’s for sure. He kept an eye on the door through his scope for Coulson’s sake, and stopped cursing Coulson for Coulson’s sake, which was a lot more affection than he generally showed people these days. He thought he should probably get a gold star for that. A long time ago, he would have been saying this Natasha via her comm. and she’d be laughing at him and promising to get him a Happy Meal when they got home and she’d fucking do it too. She’d get him a Happy Meal and the toy car or the Iron Man or whatever else it came with that week. He had a whole collection. He didn’t even really like them, or fast food, but hell, it was one of the first things he and Natasha had between them when he first flipped her to their side. He still had them. Couldn’t give them up.

            “She’s in,” said Coulson in his ear. “She has Raines.”

            Before Clint could reply, Natasha appeared on the ground next to his perch with a soft pop in the air, supporting a beaten, bloodied man who did, vaguely, resemble Raines. Clint slipped down off the roof, wincing at the shock pain that sliced through his body on landing, and he reached for Raines. “Fuck, man, it was only like twenty minutes.”

            Raines smiled through a bloodied mouth. “They didn’t ask questions. Just beat me.”

            “Let’s go,” Natasha said breathlessly, and she took Clint’s hand, hers small and warm and dry in his, and he felt the tug from beneath his chest he only felt once before in his life.

            She took them back to the op room. There must not have been a lot of options in her mind. She landed them in the middle of a crowded room of panicked people. She gasped, her hand gripping Clint’s tightly, and he did, without thinking, squeeze her hand back as he opened his eyes to the hands of other people reaching for them. Someone called for medics, he thought, and Natasha was saying something to him that he couldn’t quite hear. She looked at him, confused, and then put her hands on his face, pushing him down into a chair. She covered his ears for a bit, her face pale and intent. He forgot how her brow furrowed whenever she was worried.

            He pulled her hands off his ears and winced at the flood of sound. “I can hear now.”

            “Alright?” she asked quietly.

            He nodded, then realized he was still holding her hands. He dropped them immediately. She crossed her arms, hiding her hands. She backed up a few steps, turned and fled. Clint’s hands curled into fists and he scrubbed at his face hard. He dropped the rifle to the floor and shed his pack. Next to him, medics were treating and removing Raines from the room. It was a long while before anyone noticed Clint, and he didn’t mind it so much.

            Coulson touched his shoulder. “Get some rest.”

            “At least we got an ID.” Clint said. “That was sloppy. Whose gun goes off accidentally? No one’s. That was not okay, Coulson.”

            “I know.”

            “I mean it.”

            “He made a mistake.”

            “He made a rookie mistake.” Clint looked up. “He could have died.”

            “Things go south on missions. You know this.”

            Clint winced. “Low blow.”

            Coulson looked up at the screen. “Get rest. We’ll debrief. I have to go upstairs.”

            “Fury going to call off the whole mission?”

            “Unlikely, but you never know. There will be a review. You might have to write something.”

            Clint scrubbed at his eyes again though it was his ears that rang. “Great. You know where to find me if you need me. I’ll see you in the morning.”

            “Night, Barton,” said Coulson heavily.

            Twelve hours was a short period of time for the mission, but any amount of time was enough time for things to go wrong. Clint dragged himself up to his room and stripped out of the humidity soaked clothing. The cold shower felt good. He stood in there, letting the water run over him for a long time. When he got out, he had three text messages.

            Phil: Fury wants a memo on his desk by morning for decision on mission. Sorry.  
            Natasha: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.  
            Rick S: wtf happened? Natasha showed up at the base bar, did three shots in rapid succession, texted you, and then walked away.

            “Shit,” muttered Clint. He texted Natasha back: don’t be sorry. You got Raines out before shit went real bad. I gotta write a memo. I’ll be up for awhile. Don’t drink too much.

            He texted Phil back: He’s lucky he scares the shit out of me. Tell him I’ll have it in the hour.

            And he texted Rick S: blame Phil and Phillip Raines.

            Rick S: I blame a lot of things on those two guys but rarely in the same sentence. Coming down?

            Clint: memo to write. Another night.

            Natasha: I’m ignoring the creepy factor of you knowing everything I do in favor of being glad you even replied.

            He didn’t reply to that one. What was there to say?


	6. Chapter 6

Fury didn’t cancel the mission. Fury took Clint’s memo, took Raines off duty and Natasha didn’t even want to know how much trouble he was in after learning the circumstances of him being captured, and they remained on for infiltration and assassination in three days time. She went back to studying the rooms. Everyone went back to their jobs. The only thing that was different was that she and Clint could, somehow, talk to each other, quietly and with civility, and sticking to safe topics. But it was a noticeable difference. She told herself it wasn’t anything, that it meant nothing, he was just under pressure from Coulson and the team not to let his hatred for her overwhelm their mission. Clint hated fucking up a mission. Raines screwing up probably sat poorly in Clint and he probably felt responsible.

            She was only guessing because she didn’t know him these days. Sometimes she caught him staring at her, curiously and openly, like he didn’t care whether she saw him. Still, he always looked away before she did. And once or twice when she was at the gym, sparring and practicing with her throwing knives, she saw him pass through and watch her for a few minutes. She was embarrassed to admit it made her fight better, throw a little more accurately. She missed the competition of him as her partner. She wanted him back. In more ways than one, but Natasha Romanov didn’t admit that. Not to him, not to anyone, not even Coulson.

            They practiced in a mockup of the compound. Originally, they thought they could practice jumping but she couldn’t risk it. The three jumps in rapid succession had exhausted her. She had fallen asleep after sending Clint a second text message, and woken up to a silent phone. The disappointment sat heavy in her chest, weighing her down a little more as the hours ticked by over the three days prior to the mission.

            The night before the second half of their mission began, she sat in the office, going over the floorplan again, until she could recite the dimension of any room and its configuration when she flipped over the flash cards.

            “You should get rest,” he said quietly behind her. She knew he was there just before he spoke, but his voice threw her off. It was gentle. The way he used to tell her to get some rest back in the day.

            She shrugged. “I won’t sleep. Might as well be useful.”

            “You used to sleep well before missions,” he said, walking across the room to sit on a desk next to her. His legs dangled and he kicked them a bit, looking tired, carefree, and gentle. The person she used to know and love. She looked away from him.

            “Yes,” she said in the awkward silence. What else could she say? He didn’t ask what changed. He knew what changed.

            “Why did you hide it, all those years?”

            She startled, looking up at him. He studied her curiously. She narrowed her eyes right back at him. “Why are you asking now? Shouldn’t you have asked this a year ago?”

            “Probably would have saved us a lot of heartbreak, wouldn’t it,” he replied.

            Natasha blinked. “What does that mean?”

            “Why’d you hide it?”

            “I was afraid,” she said quietly, “that I’d be trapped, or used, the way the Red Room did.”

            He nodded slowly. “It was your escape plan.”

            She shrugged. “Yes.”

            “I was afraid too.” The softness in his voice made her close her eyes and unwillingly think about his touch. “Fear is a mind killer.”

            She smiled, still with her eyes closed. “Dune still your favorite book?”

            “Only book worth reading,” he replied. Then she heard him slide off the desk. “Get some rest, Tasha.”

            “I will.”

            He closed the door behind him. She exhaled as slowly as she could to regain control of her heart and mind, picked up her flashcards, and went back to studying.

            The next morning, they assembled in an empty training room. Natasha was in charge for this point. She had them circle up, holding hands, and then she inserted herself between Amy and Clint. It was shameless, seeking comfort from someone who didn’t want to give it, but his face remained calm and unreadable. His hand, large, firm and dry. His bow slung on his back. Natasha looked around the circle.

            “I’m jumping us as we discussed onto the roof of the compound. I’m then jumping Harry to the second floor for Martin and Juliette and Amy to the secondary compound for demolition. I’ll jump Juliette and Amy back to the roof. That’s our rendezvous point. We’ll wait there for Barton, Harry, and Taylor to return for the final jump. We should be there no more than an hour.”

            “Let’s do it,” said Clint next to her. Coulson gave her the thumbs up over the circle’s head. Natasha closed her eyes and felt the pull of the circle on her center. She focused on the roof, and made the jump.

            She opened her eyes as Clint’s hand gripped her tightly. They landed safely. She pulled them into a crouch on the roof, squinting in the bright light. The middle of the roof on a mountain jungle military complex was incredibly bright. From their notes, there were two guards who walked the perimeter of the roof every fifteen minutes. That didn’t give them a lot of time. Harry was doubled over, retching. She slipped over to him.

            “Ready?” she asked.

            He looked up, looking motion sick but stubborn. He nodded. She took his hand, closed her eyes, and thought of an empty storage room on the second floor. She jumped him quickly down there, and returned to the roof. Juliette and Amy barely recovered from the first jump before Natasha crouched next to them. “You got this,” she told them. They took her hands and she jumped them a half mile to the east, to a second compound where most of the weapons and students were trained. They went under a bridge and along the outside of a building, laying down liquid explosives. They were nearly done when they took heavy fire, having been spotted. Natasha didn’t have a weapon on her but she used Juliette’s to return fire while the two women finished their goal. Amy lit them up and Natasha grabbed their hands, making the jump just as the place exploded beneath their feet.

            They landed hard, gasping for air. Natasha sank to the ground, feeling strangely woozy. _The heat,_ she thought to herself. She felt a hand grab her shoulder. “Fuck,” swore Clint. “Natasha, where they’d hit you?”

            “I didn’t get hit,” she said to him crossly then tried to sit up. The world pitched wildly. She focused on his gray eyes. “Oh. Where?”

            He slung his bow over his shoulder and crouched by her, his hands gently feeling her sides. His fingers, familiar, comforting, hers. They were hers. His hands were hers, she owned them. They crossed too much of her body not to belong to her.

Clint’s eyes narrowed at her. “Twice. Right through your ribs. You have an exit wound. And another’s in your hip. No exit. Natasha, we gotta get you out of here. Jump out. We’ll ex fil another way.”

            “No,” she snapped furiously, and took a painful shuddering breath. There was the pain. It took a long time to show up. Her adrenaline must be high but she barely registered that thought. She grabbed his hand. “I can do this.”

            He nodded, slowly, and took his hands off her sides. She looked at her blood covering him. She shook her head. “I hate surgery.”

            “You have about thirty minutes before you’ll be prepped,” he said, almost cheerfully. “Don’t you dare fuck up on me now.”

            “I don’t do it on purpose,” she said, propping herself up against a wall as he retreated to cover Harry with his bow. She closed her eyes. “Good thing that I only have one more jump left.”

            Clint snorted. “I hate being reliant on this.”

            “Me too,” she admitted sleepily.

            “Amy, Juliette, keep her awake,” snapped Clint. “Don’t let her fall asleep. Put pressure on her wounds.”

            “I can do it,” Natasha swatted at them.

            “You can’t,” said Amy tiredly. She had an injured shoulder and a burn on her face but she pressed Natasha’s bloody tshirt against her ribs. Natasha winced. Amy said, “You may not like jumping, but it is easier.”

            “You think that,” said Clint, “and then you remember if she dies, we’re shit out of luck.”

            “She won’t die,” Amy said.

            “Yes,” said Juliette angrily, “That’s the only bad side effect of her dying. Try to give a shit and act like you have a heart, Barton.”

            “Right now is a bad time to get into this but rest assured I’d be plenty fucked up if she died. So try not to let her,” he growled. Natasha vaguely heard the sound of an arrow loosing.

            She muttered, “Who are you shooting? ROE, Clint.”

            “Fuck your rules of engagement,” he replied. There was a pause, and then he said, “I’m following them. People shooting at me first. Don’t get your panties in a twist.”

            “Not wearing them,” murmured Natasha.

            “Yeah, don’t tell me that. I’m trying to focus,” Clint told her.

            Natasha wished she could have seen Amy and Juliette’s faces. She focused on breathing in and out. Pain was a fickle friend of hers. Her vision changed as she breathed. Inhaled, and red splashed across, like spilled drops of ink on the inside of her eyelids. She exhaled, and everything softened in a white so bright it hummed beneath her skin. She curled her fingers around the hem of her shirt. Twice, she felt Clint come back, crouch next to her, and speak quietly to Amy and Juliette. His rough, archery-calloused hands brushed her cheeks. She reached for him, closed her hand around his wrist and the watch she gave him a few years ago for his birthday. He extracted himself after a few heartbeats, let her hand fall to her lap, and disappeared again. She felt the coldness in the air when he left.

            Then, finally, he came back and slipped a hand under the back of her neck. “Natasha. Ready?”

            She opened her eyes, summoning every bit of energy she had left her body. She met his eyes ferociously and gripped his hand. “Yes. Everyone’s here?”

            “We’re all here,” said Henry. He leaned forward and put a hand on Natasha’s shoulder. Everyone reached for her, holding her down and lifting her up with their touch. “Let’s do this.”

            Natasha did not close her eyes. She never let her eyes leave Clint’s and she pulled them through on the last jump.


	7. Chapter 7

Jumping felt like someone was unstitching Clint at the seams. His first thought when they arrived was how much he hated that sensation. His second thought was that Natasha’s hand was too limp in his. His eyes opened. The Ops room was in chaos. In Natasha’s delusional, weakened state, she had jumped them right into the middle of an Operations Room trying to deal with multiple ops going on worldwide. Their dirty, blown apart, and bloodied team had collided with people who were shouting and cursing. Clint inhaled sharply and found Coulson wading through at the precise moment that people began to realize how badly hurt the entire team was. Then shouts for medics and doctors began. Coulson was pale, thin-lipped. He mouthed across the room, _Tasha?_

            Clint looked down at the red-headed woman sprawled on the floor. She was paler than snow, and her body covered in blood, dark and sticky, glistening on top of her clothes. She was still bleeding. He yelled for a doctor and pressed his hands to Natasha’s wounds, his heart slamming into his palms. Coulson appeared at his side, crouching and reaching forward with two fingers towards Natasha’s neck to take her pulse.

            “She’s alive!” snapped Clint, though he wasn’t sure, though the idea of her not being alive made him want to leap off the nearest building. _Na-tasha, Na-tasha, Na-tasha,_ his heart whispered to her, speaking through his palms against her trickling wounds.

            Coulson closed his eyes, his fingers on her neck, and then opened them. “Barely.”

            A medic showed up next to them, pushing Clint away from her. “We need an OR stat.”

            “She has special blood,” Coulson said suddenly. “She has blood on supply but not here. It’s at the helicarrier.”

            “Why the _fuck_ is it on the mother _fucking_ helicarrier?” yelled Clint at the top of his lungs. “That’s not where _she_ is.”

            “I think we’re aware of that, Clint,” Coulson replied, but even his normally calm façade was shaken. “Can she be prepped without the blood?”

            “She’s lost too much. She take O negative?” The medic was joined by his colleagues as they loaded Natasha’s limp body onto a stretcher.

            “It’ll kill her.” Coulson’s voice dropped to a whisper.

            “So will the blood loss,” the medic replied. “What do you want us to do, sir?”

            Clint’s blood shivered in his veins. He looked up at Coulson, a mixture of dawning horror and delight crawling over him. “Me. I’m her blood donor.”

            They set him up behind a curtain, in the OR, a needle in his arm taking blood straight from his body through some sort of plasma machine that spun it out and into Natasha. A continuous flow from him to Natasha, just like she set up, without the machine, in a safe house a year ago. Just like she saved him with her strange, mutant blood a year ago, he would save her now with her own blood. They told him that she’d need more than he had to give in his body. They let him give as much as he could, and then he fell asleep there, in that bed, with Coulson pacing between them. When he woke, his body had bounced back enough for him to donate more blood.

            He smiled weakly at Coulson. “Guess it was a little contagious.”

            Coulson shook his head. “She’s lucky. You’re lucky. God, you two.”

            Clint closed his eyes. “Can I see her?”

            “In a bit. You need to rest.” Coulson said it, and Clint fell asleep, like it was nothing. Like he always slept. Like he didn’t just ask to see her.

            When he woke for the second time, it was morning, and they were both in the same room, somewhere on the recovery ward. Natasha was hooked up to a dozen machines, all beeping and whirring their content with her vital signs. Clint stared at them for a moment, watching her blood pressure and her heart rate remain steady, for minutes. He exhaled and swung his legs out of bed, shuffling over in his hospital pajamas to her bedside. Another time, he would have sat on the edge of the bed and taken her hand. Now, he only wavered, then sat in the cold plastic chair. He covered his mouth with his hands and watched her sleep.

            “They said you might be waking up,” Rick said, knocking on the doorframe. He nodded to Natasha. “How’s she doing?”

            Clint shrugged. “She’s alive.”

            Rick made a murmuring noise of acknowledgement and then grabbed a chair, dragging it over to Natasha’s side. He rested his chin on his arms, studying her. “What happened?”

            He wasn’t asking about the last mission. He was asking about the last mission before that one. Clint closed his eyes. “I was shot. Silencer in an alley, they got the jump on me. I lost a lot of blood before Natasha got to me. She jumped me to a safe house, and then set up a transfusion line. She jumped me again home, once I was stable, once she thought that I would survive.”

            “You didn’t know, before then.” It wasn’t a question.

            Clint shook his head. “No.”

            Rick blew out hard and shook his head. “You, the person who hates surprises, revels in routine, and likes to think your problems through.”

            “Blindsided,” agreed Clint quietly, not taking his eyes off Natasha. “I may have overreacted.”

            “Yeah,” Rick smiled a bit. “You may have. But it’s not over yet, mate.”

            Clint slumped in his seat and reached for her hand. It was cold and did not react when he squeezed it. “She hasn’t woken up yet.” 


	8. Chapter 8

It was two weeks before Natasha was allowed out of the medical wing. In that time, he never visited once. Coulson came every day in the afternoon, brought her a new book from the library, asked how she was feeling, and told her to rest up. She wanted to ask about him. She knew he lived—the doctors told her that everyone lived through the mission now that she did—but she did not know why he was not there. She had kicked herself for expecting him to be there, for wanting him to be there, for expecting that anything changed. Of course it hadn’t. It was Clint and he was stubborn and she was stubborn and she had messed up and he had overreacted and her nearly dying was never going to change the string of dominoes that she had, ultimately, pressed into play.

            She did not ask Coulson how Clint was. She never once asked. If Coulson looked at her sadly sometimes, she didn’t notice. She did not care to notice.

            They released her out of the medical bay though she was still on restricted work duty. The first thing she did was to take a shower. Her stitches were out, though she had a drain placed at one wound, and her hair was knotted and gross. She sighed with relief as she worked the conditioner through the tangles and combed them out. She put on clean clothes that were not hospital clothes, and felt much more like herself. Her body ached, but her mind felt clear. She wandered down the hall toward the general mess and common room that the team used, hoping to find food that wasn’t the medical bay menu of bland, bland, and increasingly bland. She grew up in Russia. If she never ate another potato, she’d be a happy woman.

            The room fell silent as she entered. The entire team was there, sitting around a football game, nachos, and beers. Everyone looked at her for a long moment, and then just as she was finding Clint in the crowd, they rose as one unit to hug her and tell her how good she looked. She found his eyes over their shoulders. He remained at the table, standing up instead of slouched against it as he had been, his face pale and his eyes wide. She thanked everyone, and then as she was starting to feel claustrophobic, someone scored a touchdown and everyone’s attention moved back to the television. Grateful, Natasha moved away from Clint’s eyes and the others’ touch to the sink. She rummaged through the mugs to find her favorite and began to fill it with water.

            Arms slipped around her middle and a too familiar face buried itself against her neck. Natasha closed her eyes as Clint pressed himself against her and pulled her against him as gently as he could manage. His skin against her skin was damp with tears and his shoulders trembled against her own. Natasha heard the sudden silence in the room but she couldn’t deal with that right now. Hope, warm and vibrant, opened in her chest, bright like stepping into sunshine. She closed her eyes and let her head list slightly to rest against his head. She folded a hand over his hands at her stomach and lifted the other to caress the side of his face.

            “It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s okay. We’re okay.”

            He didn’t answer. He just kept his face hidden against her, held her against him, and cried. She stood there, letting him hold her, and finding that she did want to be held. She did want to hear her own words back at her. She did want to know that his fears would not be her own, and that her fears would not become his. She took a deep breath that shivered on the exhale and she felt his hiccup against her back.

            He rested his chin on her shoulder, pulling his face away slightly. His voice, warm and not at all a whisper, slipped through her veins, making her feel alive. “Wherever we go, there we’ll be.”

            He had once told her, early after she had turned and come into SHIELD, that she couldn’t keep running from what she had been trained to be. He had said, simply, _Wherever you go, there you are._ And a few years later, when they found that marital strife was no different on a mission than it was on a base, she had quipped the phrase back at him with different pronouns. He had laughed then.

            Now, she didn’t laugh. She only smiled sadly and shrugged. “We haven’t been here for awhile.”

            “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, in the quiet room. “For being afraid.”

            “I’m sorry for not trusting you,” she whispered back. “Clint.”

            “There we’ll be,” he insisted.

            In the early hours of the next morning, he knocked on her door. She opened it, surprised, tired, bleary-eyed, confused, and wary. She did not want him there. Not yet. They had too much to work through, too much to talk about, and for god’s sake, she at least wanted to be off base and without a drain between two ribs if—

            He was in mission clothes. He looked resigned and regretful. He hefted his bow case up on his shoulder in the dim light and cracked a weary smile. “It never ends.”

            She leaned against the doorway. “Where?”

            “Venezuela. Then New Mexico. Escorting a scientist home, apparently.” He shrugged. “Don’t know why they need me.”

            She did. She knew. He was the best. He was reliable and trustworthy for the exact reasons their marriage failed: he did not trust anyone. It was the same reason they once had her babysit Tony Stark. She was reliable and trustworthy because she would never be conned by the playboy billionaire into trusting him. She was also why their marriage failed. She stepped forward, touched the edges of his black and purple vest, and curled her fingers around the zipper tag. She could feel the edges of his unshaven chin against her forehead.

            “Go. I’ll see you in New Mexico,” she said quietly.

            “Yeah?” he sounded so plaintive and hopeful, like the Clint she remembered from years ago.

            She looked up, smiled back at him. “Yeah.” She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek, chastely and quickly, but enough to promise. She stepped back into her room. “Go.”

            He went.

            So did she. A mission they suspended years ago in Russia because the trail went cold was green lit again and only she could take the mission. She called Clint who had just arrived in New Mexico. He told her to do what she wanted to do. She accepted the Russian mission.  


	9. Chapter 9

_Three Hours after Shawarma_

            Clint hurt in places he didn’t know he could hurt. He didn’t know when the last time he slept was because he lost several days to being mind controlled by an alien. His head felt like someone had slammed it against a metal railing. Someone _had_ slammed it against a metal railing. The woman limping next to him and pretending she wasn’t hurt happened to have done that.

They were six blocks away from the shawarma restaurant and not yet out of the downtown destruction before Clint reached over and took her hand. She squeezed it in reply. It was five months since they had seen each other, since they had somewhat made up, and he had tried to kill her, and she had had to nearly kill him. A reversal of fortune, Coulson would call it. Clint’s heart seized up when he thought of Coulson.

            “Don’t,” advised Natasha, in that uncanny way she used to have about the silent thoughts. He gave her a suspicious look about perhaps she hadn’t told them about the other part of her gift that was mind reading. She didn’t react, just kept limping and pulling him along toward a safe house they used to have on the Upper East Side. He did not want to think about how tired she was. Tony told him quietly that Natasha had been so exhausted by the time Coulson tracked her down and called her in that she managed only two jumps: one to India, and one to the helicarrier.

            Clint hadn’t believed his ears. “She jumped the Hulk here?”

            Tony had rolled his eyes. “No. She jumped Banner here. The Hulk’s just bonus.”

            Natasha, out of jumps, too tired to use magic engrained in her DNA and her blood, had brought him back from the devil himself. Clint did not know how to hold his gratitude toward her and his fear and his guilt all at the same time. He remained silent as he didn’t know what to say. They rode the elevator to their floor, slumped against opposing walls, stealing looks at each other. Natasha shook keys free from her uniform while Clint tried not to stare. She gave him a thin smile at that. “Where do you think I kept the keys?”

            He shrugged. “Magic.”

            “If only,” she said, surprisingly good natured, but perhaps she was too tired to fight with him. He didn’t know. He didn’t understand anything. She nodded to the hallway off the living room as they stepped together into a musty apartment they hadn’t used in a long time. “You get first shower.”

            He should have argued but he didn’t. He stripped in the bathroom, leaving the door open, like he always used to because he had a thing about closed doors, and he didn’t care if Natasha was looking. He kind of wanted her to look. Instead, he could hear her in the kitchen, cursing and clattering about. For a brief moment, this was them four years ago, bumbling about domestic life, colliding together like stars exploding in space, hot and angry and beautiful and destructive and utterly out of control. Just, their speed, tonight, was unusually slow.

            Clint scrubbed himself nearly raw in the shower, trying to get all the glass and dust out of his skin. It seemed like a useless effort. He stepped out and found a towel that smelled fairly musty, but less musty than the other one that he figured he’d leave for Natasha. He dried himself off and limped into the bedroom. He had been considerably thinner, apparently, when they last lived here, but he managed to find a pair of jeans and a t-shirt that fit, mostly.

            He squinted at Natasha when he walked back into the living room. “What are you doing?”

            “Cooking,” she said, unable to keep the frustration out of her voice. “Cooking. I’m cooking.”

            He stilled at the sound of her voice. She sounded…fuck, she sounded _delicate_. He could count on…yeah, one finger the time that Natasha allowed herself to sound delicate without the purpose of seducing anyone. He watched her peer into a pot. “Tasha.”

            “I wanted to make something. Outside there’s,” she waved a hand and then lifted her eyes to him. His heart nearly broke in half at the tears in her blue eyes. She looked away and drew in a deep breath.

            He understood. Outside, destruction. Inside, creation. He said quietly, “Go shower, Nat. I’ll finish it.”

            “It’s just a can of soup but I think I’m burning it.”

            “It’s okay,” he said. He didn’t tell her that they just ate. “Go shower. You’ll feel better. I promise.”

            She put the spoon down on the counter. “Okay.”

            When she passed him, she stopped, caught the tips of his fingers in her fingers, and then let them go. She shut the bathroom door behind her. She had a thing about shutting doors. He managed to add water and save the soup that she wanted to make, and found a bottle of wine. He poured them two glasses and took them out to the fire escape overlooking the avenue. People were finally leaving their houses, wandering around and hugging each other. Looked like a lot of people didn’t have power and they were exchanging batteries, candles, and flashlights. Kids ran in the streets, playing with balls and hula hoops. The sounds of sirens and helicopters were distant.

            “Better,” she whispered, stepping out onto the metal grate, and settling down next to him. She accepted the wine he handed her and sipped it, closing her eyes. Her skin glistened, not completely dried off after the shower, and her curls clung to her skin, dark. They reminded him of her blood on the outside of her body and he looked away. She sank slightly against the wall, against him.

            For a long time, they sat there and then Clint asked wonderingly, “What’s going to become of us?”

            Natasha, to her credit, considered his question. “Us, as in you and me, or us as in that team?”

            Clint glanced at her. “Both.”

            Natasha was quiet for a long time, then she curled her toes against the top of his foot. They used to spend hours out here, nursing their wounds, drinking, laughing, flirting with each other. This felt so close to old times, and so incredibly far away from those times. Clint watched Natasha’s eyes focus and her lips purse outward in thought.

            Finally, she said, “We’re going to be okay.”

            He let his arm relax to rest against hers. “We as in you and I, or we as in the team?”

            “Both,” she told him softly with a smile.

            They stayed up there a long time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know how this story got into my head, but it did. It was written as a mental break between my two novels-in-progress, so it's uneven and unbeta'd but I hope you liked it.


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